Nurse and Midwife Recruitment Films for the International Year of the Nurse
A series of nurse and midwife recruitment films for the Hertfordshire and West Essex Sustainability and Transformation Partnership, finished right as the country went into its first coronavirus lockdown.
CLIENT
Hertfordshire and West Essex Sustainability and Transformation Partnership
SECTOR
Healthcare · Recruitment
SERVICES
Recruitment films · Filming · Editing · Final delivery
The brief
The Hertfordshire and West Essex Sustainability and Transformation Partnership needed a series of recruitment films themed around the International Year of the Nurse and Midwife 2020. The original plan was straightforward: finish in time for a recruitment event at the end of March.
Then coronavirus arrived. The brief never changed, but the world around it did, and the films were finished just as a country-wide lockdown came into force and the whole health system pivoted to testing and treating those who had tested positive.
The finished films needed to work as genuine encouragement to join the profession, at the exact moment the NHS needed that message most.
The approach
Working closely with people who help and save lives daily, the priority was letting real nurses and midwives speak honestly about why they chose the profession, rather than a scripted recruitment pitch.
Rather than a generic recruitment advert, the aim was films that helped prospective candidates understand:
- What a genuine day in the life of a nurse or midwife actually looks like
- Why the International Year of the Nurse and Midwife mattered as a moment to recruit
- The genuine variety of roles and specialisms on offer across the partnership
- Where to find out more, through the Hertfordshire and West Essex Health and Care Academy (now part of the Central East ICB)
Filming took place before the pandemic reached the UK, with editing and final delivery completing right as the first lockdown began, an unplanned but genuinely powerful piece of timing.
Production
The project involved genuine access to frontline nursing and midwifery staff during their working day. This included:
- Filming real nurses and midwives across the partnership, talking honestly about their own roles
- Structuring the films around the International Year of the Nurse and Midwife theme
- Capturing genuine day-to-day moments across different care settings
- Editing at pace once the pandemic changed the timeline the project was originally built around
- Delivering the finished films in time to still serve their original recruitment purpose
Throughout, the priority stayed on the people at the centre of it, nurses and midwives genuinely worth celebrating, coronavirus or not.
The result
The finished films gave the partnership genuine, timely recruitment content, arriving right when the NHS needed to encourage people into the profession more than ever.
What began as a straightforward recruitment campaign for a single event became something with far more resonance once coronavirus reshaped the context around it entirely.
By combining honest access to real nursing and midwifery staff with a genuinely fast turnaround once the pandemic hit, the project became proof that the right content, delivered at the right moment, can matter more than anyone originally planned for.
Why this project worked
This project shows how a planned campaign can land somewhere its makers never expected. Filmed before the pandemic and delivered right as it began, these films ended up meaning more than anyone involved could have predicted when the brief was first agreed.